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Tennessee Tea Party Wants to Erase "Slavery" From U.S. Textbooks

Tennessee Tea Party members are trying to eliminate references to slavery in American history textbooks.

Salon.com reports that Tea Partiers, who idolize America’s Founding Fathers, do not want students to learn that many of them owned slaves:

For a bunch of people who worship the Founders and like to play dress-up American Revolutionary War, Tea Partyers sure hate knowing anything remotely reality-based about the Founding Fathers. Tennessee Tea Party groups have introduced a proposal to take what few minorities there are in American history textbooks out of American history textbooks, along with any negative portrayals of the wealthy white men who led this young nation in its infancy.

At a press conference, two dozen activists presented their proposals — I’m sorry, their “demands” — for the new state legislative session. Among them are sweeping changes to school materials that they probably have not actually read.

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

In reality, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings and James Madison brought a slave with him to the White House when he became president.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the congressional Tea Party caucus, once claimed that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery.